Coding, indexing, and mirroring AOL progs actually changed my life. I got expelled in 8th grade due to my school's network admin claiming I was hacking the Apple school network using Win32 VB AOL tools (?!), which kick-started a series of more run-ins with future school administrators, made my mother so depressed she couldn't get out of bed, and eventually led to me quitting school altogether. I didn't think of AOL as the spark that led to all this until just now.
It definitely had a way of instilling a sort of wonder about what was "behind" all those windows, what was possible, and whether you could get it to do something it wasn't supposed to. Punters were the weirdest thing about AOL, because they could have easily fixed them but seemingly never did. If it stopped working in a new version, a simple modification would make it work again.